10 U.S. companies about to earn $4B or more!

Corporate profits are on pace to be the biggest ever this quarter. But a big slice of those profits are falling into the hands of a select group of companies, which investors need to know about.

There is an elite group of just 10 companies in the Standard & Poor’s 500, including ExxonMobil (XOM), Apple (AAPL) and Wells Fargo (WFC), expected to haul in a bigger slice of overall profit in the second calendar quarter than any others, to the tune of $4 billion or more, according to a USA TODAY analysis of data from S&P Capital IQ.

The profit titan of the quarter is expected to be energy giant ExxonMobil. The company’s quarterly profit is expected to be an adjusted $1.86 a share. Multiply that by Exxon’s 4.3 billion shares outstanding, and you’re looking at a quarterly profit of $8.0 billion. What’s truly astounding is that the company’s adjusted earnings, already the biggest of any stocks in the S&P 500, are expected to jump 20% during the quarter.

Following Exxon on the whopping profit train is Apple, which is due to post a profit of $7.4 billion. That’s based on analysts’ forecasts for adjusted earnings of $1.22 a share on 6 billion shares. Analysts saw the company’s earnings will grow more than 14%.

Investors haven’t been all that impressed, though, by these company’s enormous profits. A custom equal-weighted index of the stocks likely to earn $4 billion or more in the second quarter is up 7.4% over the past three months, right in line with the 7.6% gain by the S&P 500.

Chart source: S&P Capital IQ

Analysts, though, seem to think there’s more upside in many of these mega-profit companies. Eight of the 10 companies win an “outperform” rating from analysts and just two, Microsoft (MSFT) and International Business Machines (IBM), have hold ratings.

Below are the 10 companies on deck to earn $4 billion or more in the second calendar quarter.